48Hour Discovery of Chemically-modified Peptide Ligands

Company Description

48Hour Discovery Inc. is a Canadian start-up company providing services in ligand discovery using an unprecedented turnaround time at a manageable cost. Founded in February 2017, our core business is rooted in our patented molecular discovery platform emanating from the expertise and IP generated by the Derda Research Group the University of Alberta. The company will provide chemical structures of chemically-modified peptide ligands—a list of 50–100 confident leads—within 48 hours of the receipt of the target by the company. We use genetically-encoded (GE)-libraries of peptides as a starting material for multi-step organic synthesis to produce GE-libraries of peptide derivatives. Genetically-Encoded Discovery platform (3), combines 10^8 peptide fragments with variable, silently-encoded modifications(4). The presentation will highlight the advances in application of our discovery platform to non-druggable targets such as carbohydrate binding proteins and technologies we developed not only to accelerate discovery but also maximize the reproducibility of discovery.
References
1. (a) J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2014, 136, 8149. (b) ACS Chem. Biol., 2012, 7, 1482
2. (a) ACS Chem. Biol., 2014, 9, 443. (b) Chem. Sci., 2016, 7, 3785. (c) Org. Biomol. Chem., 2016, 14, 5539-5545.
3. Ng et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2015, 137, 5248
4. Tjhung et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2016, 138, 32.

Bio

Ratmir Derda received his undergraduate degree in Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 2001, Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008, under the supervision of Laura L. Kiessling, and postdoctoral training at Harvard University under the supervision of George M. Whitesides and Donald E. Ingber. He joined University of Alberta in 2011 as an Assistant Professor in Chemistry. In 2012, he became a principal investigator at the Alberta Glycomics Centre. Derda lab develops genetically-encoded libraries to solve fundamental problems in chemical reactivity, molecular recognition and cell differentiation. Notable awards include Rising Star in Chemical Biology from the International Chemical Biology Society (2016); Young Investigator Award from the Boulder Peptide Society (2014); Canadian Rising Star in Global Health (2011).